The 6th Annual Alex Pediatric Surgery Congress and 1st Nile of Hope Hospital Congress conference, in cooperation with Colorectal Team Overseas (CTO), provides updates in colorectal, urogenital disorders and pelvic reconstructions in pediatrics. The Children’s National Hospital colorectal team was due to present at the conference in Alexandria, Egypt, in April 2020, but due to the global COVID-19 pandemic the event was indefinitely postponed. Despite this, Marc Levitt, M.D., Colorectal and Pelvic Reconstructive Surgeon at Children’s National, and Founder and Head of the CTO, presented educational sessions virtually to Egyptian surgeons throughout the month of April.

Surgeons assemble in a virtual Zoom session for a case presentation on anorectal malformations by Marc Levitt, M.D., and the Children’s National colorectal team.

The video conferences allowed surgeons and experts to come together and foster the global collaboration that benefits colorectal teams and patients worldwide. The first session included 70 pediatric surgeons from Egypt and grew to over 128 attendees in the last session. The presentations spanned a variety of topics and can be accessed at the links below:

Joining Dr. Levitt in the discussion were members of the Children’s National colorectal nursing team, including Julie Choueiki, Program Manager, Justine Garofalo, CPNP, Meghan Mesa, Tara Garbarino, CPNP, and Katherine Worst, CPNP-AC. The integrated Children’s National colorectal team elevates the significance of the nursing role in caring for complex patients. For example, cases in the Bowel Management Program require hours of ongoing nursing care. The team demonstrated the partnership that benefits children when surgeons include and value nursing presence in the care of colorectal patients.

Moving forward, the team will bring continued virtual, telehealth collaboration and education. Doing so will expand the potential for more colorectal patients to receive the care they need.

Marc Levitt, M.D., presents on the ARM Index in a virtual webinar to pediatric surgeons in Egypt.

Sadiqa Kendi, M.D., FAAP, CPST, a pediatric emergency physician at Children’s National and medical director of Safe Kids DC, is among the 2019 cohort of Bloomberg Fellows, an initiative that provides world-class training to public health professionals tackling some of the most intractable challenges facing the U.S.

The Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on June 6, 2019, announced fellows who will receive full scholarships to earn an MPH or DrPH as they tackle five U.S. health challenges: addiction and overdose, environmental challenges, obesity and the food system, risks to adolescent health and violence. Now in its third year, the largest group of fellows to date includes representatives from organizations headquartered in 24 states and the District of Columbia.

As part of her environmental challenges fellowship, Dr. Kendi will attempt to lessen the significant morbidity and mortality suffered by children, especially children of color, due to unintentional injuries. Children’s emergency department handles more than 100,000 pediatric visits per year, 1,200 of which result in hospital admission.

“The numbers are staggering: 25% of emergency department visits by kids and more than $28 billion in health care spending are associated with injuries. These preventable injuries claim the highest number of pediatric lives, and children of color and lower income families often disproportionately bear this burden,” Dr. Kendi says.

“Regrettably, I have seen the personal toll close up, and it has been sobering to hug a sobbing parent whose child clings to life after being struck by a car; to clasp the hand of a frightened child who has fallen from playground equipment and suffered a severe fracture; to see the angst written on a caregiver’s face as I lead our team in trying to save a life that easily could have been safeguarded by installing a window guard,” she adds.

Under the auspices of Safe Kids District of Columbia, Dr. Kendi is developing a one-stop Safety Center at Children’s National to provide injury prevention equipment and education to families in five focus areas: child passenger safety, home, pedestrian, sleep and sports.

Safe Kids Worldwide, the umbrella non-profit organization for Safe Kids DC, started at Children’s National and has grown to more than 400 coalitions around the world. Safe Kids DC is the local coalition that is working to address the burden of injury in local District of Columbia communities.

“I’m grateful to be named a Bloomberg Fellow because this opportunity will enable me to better understand the theories, methods of evaluation and tools for addressing the burden of injury in the District of Columbia, including how to assess and address the built environment. This training will help me to better lead my Safe Kids DC team in developing projects, outreach programs and legislative advocacy that have the potential to directly impact the communities we serve,” she adds.

Forty years ago, Mark L. Batshaw, M.D., almost singlehandedly wrote a 23-chapter first edition that ran about 300 pages. Now Dr. Batshaw’s tome, “Children With Disabilities,” is in its eighth edition, and this new volume is almost 1,000 pages, with 42 chapters, two co-editors and over 35 authors from Children’s National.

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Back in 1978, Mark L. Batshaw, M.D., was a junior faculty member at John’s Hopkins University School of Medicine. In the evenings he taught a course in the university’s School of Education titled “The Medical and Physical Aspects of the Handicapped Child,” for Master’s level special education students. Because no textbook at that time focused on that specific topic, Batshaw developed his own slide set.

“At the end of the first year of teaching the course my students said ‘You really ought to consider writing a text book based on your slides to help us move forward,’ ” Dr. Batshaw recalls. The father of three carved out time by writing on weekends and at night, cutting back on sleep.

His first goal was to create a textbook that would serve as a curriculum for a series of courses that would be taught at universities to specialists who work with children with disabilities, including social workers, physical and occupational therapists, speech and language pathologists, special education teachers, nurses, doctors and dentists.

“I wanted to cover the whole range of disabilities and divided the book initially into a series of sections, including embryology, to help students understand what can go wrong in fetal development to lead to a developmental disability; and chapters on each developmental disability, including autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), cerebral palsy, learning disabilities and traumatic brain injury,” he says. “The third section was devoted to available treatments, including occupational and physical therapy, speech language therapy, nutrition and medications. The final section focused on outcomes.”

His second aim was for the book to serve as a reference text for professionals in the field. The 33-year-old contacted a brand-new new publisher, Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., that focused on special education. “They took a chance on me, and I took a chance on them,” he says.

Forty years ago, he almost singlehandedly produced a 23-chapter first edition that ran about 300 pages. Now Dr. Batshaw’s tome is in its eighth edition, and this new volume is almost 1,000 pages. And, rather than being its sole author, Dr. Batshaw enlisted two co-editors and at least five dozen authors who contributed specialty expertise in genetic counseling, social work, physical and occupational therapy, medicine and nursing. His daughter, Elissa, a special education teacher and school psychologist, authored a chapter about special education services, and his son, Drew, an executive at a start-up company, contributed autobiographical letters about the effect ADHD has had on his life.

A glossary of medical terms so that as the reader reviews patient reports they can easily look up an unfamiliar term

An appendix on commonly used drugs to treat children with disabilities in order to look up the medicine by name and see the range of doses

An appendix devoted to different syndromes children might have

A reference section with organizations and foundations that help children with disabilities

A web site with sections designed for students and other content designed for teachers with thought questions to guide practical use of information in each chapter and more than 450 customizable PowerPoint slides for download

Call-out boxes for interdisciplinary team members, such as genetic counselors, explaining the roles they serve and their educational background, and

Excerpts of recent research articles.

“The students say they don’t sell the book. Usually when students have a textbook, they try to sell it second hand after the course ends,” explains Dr. Batshaw, now Executive Vice President, Physician-in-Chief and Chief Academic Officer at Children’s National. “Instead, students keep it and use it as a practical reference as they become professionals in their field. It has had the impact I had hoped for both as a textbook and a reference book: They say they refer to it when they have patients with a particular disorder they’re not used to treating to read up on it.”

Now a bestseller, there are more than 200,000 copies in print, including Portuguese and Ukrainian translations. “It didn’t start that way. It grew organically,” he says.

People joke that Billie Lou Short, M.D., chief of Children’s Division of Neonatology, invented extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, known as ECMO for short. While Dr. Short did not invent ECMO, under her leadership Children’s National was the first pediatric hospital to use it. And over decades Children’s staff have perfected its use to save the lives of tiny, vulnerable newborns by temporarily taking over for their struggling hearts and lungs. For two consecutive years, Children’s neonatal intensive care unit has been named the nation’s No. 1 for newborns by U.S. News & World Report. “Despite all of these accomplishments, Dr. Short’s best legacy is what she has done as a mentor to countless trainees, nurses and faculty she’s touched during their careers. She touches every type of clinical staff member who has come through our neonatal intensive care unit,” says An Massaro, M.D., director of residency research.

For these achievements, Dr. Short received the Ninth Annual Mentorship Award in Clinical Science.

Anna Penn, M.D., Ph.D., has provided new insights into the central role that the placental hormone allopregnanolone plays in orderly fetal brain development, and her research team has created novel experimental models that mimic some of the brain injuries often seen in very preterm babies – an essential step that informs future neuroprotective strategies. Dr. Penn, a clinical neonatologist and developmental neuroscientist, “has been a primary adviser for 40 mentees throughout their careers and embodies Children’s core values of Compassion, Commitment and Connection,” says Claire-Marie Vacher, Ph.D.

For these achievements, Dr. Penn was selected to receive the Ninth Annual Mentorship Award in Basic and Translational Science.

The mentorship awards for Drs. Short and Penn were among dozens of honors given in conjunction with “Frontiers in Innovation,” the Ninth Annual Research and Education Week (REW) at Children’s National. In addition to seven keynote lectures, more than 350 posters were submitted from researchers – from high-school students to full-time faculty – about basic and translational science, clinical research, community-based research, education, training and quality improvement; five poster presenters were showcased via Facebook Live events hosted by Children’s Hospital Foundation.

Tamp down food allergy anxieties with this quiz.

Food allergies are a growing public health problem and affect up to 8 percent of U.S. children, says Linda Herbert, Ph.D., director of the Psychosocial Clinical Program within Children’s Division of Allergy & Immunology. Children can be allergic to a wide range of foods and exposure to just a small amount of a food allergen can be life-threatening. Click through our quick quiz to learn strategies parents can tap to help tamp down their teen’s anxieties about food.

1. Children can only be allergic to peanuts and shellfish, right?

2. What emotional responses can teenagers have as they contend with food allergies?

3. Which red flags help parents determine if a child with a food allergy is depressed?

4. Parents who want to help children struggling with food allergy have few options.

5. My children have been affected by food allergies since they were toddlers. They know everything they need to know about this issue.

6. Children with food allergies can be bullied about it at school.

We hope the information contained in this quiz helps you and your child to feel more engaged and empowered. Just remember, you’re not in this alone! If you are concerned and think your child needs more help than you can offer on your own, Children’s National has an allergy psychology program. Just call the main allergy line (202-476-3016) to request help.

Imagine an endocrinology division staffed with endowed researchers, clinicians and specialists, that serves as an engine of innovation, making it easy for pediatricians to make the right referrals, based on the best research, to endocrinologists who can provide families with cutting-edge care.

Andrew Dauber, M.D., MMSc, the new chief of endocrinology at Children’s National, is turning this dream into a reality. Over the next few years, Dr. Dauber will work with a nationally-ranked endocrinology and diabetes center to build a clinical endocrinology research program, housing specialty clinics for Turner’s syndrome, thyroid care and growth disorders, amongst others.

To put his real-life hypothesis of providing an engine for innovation into practice, Dr. Dauber led the interdisciplinary growth center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and organized a Genomics First for Undiagnosed Diseases Program to study genetic clues for undiagnosed diseases. At Boston Children’s Hospital, he was the assistant medical director for the clinical research unit and held academic appointments with Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Dauber finds it’s critically important to merge clinical practice with research and education. He received his medical degree and a Master’s of Medical Sciences in Clinical Investigation from Harvard Medical School. He has published more than 65 studies examining genetic clues to endocrine disorders, with a focus on short stature and growth disorders.

Dr. Dauber conducted the majority of his research – ranging from studying genetic clues for rare growth disorders and causes of precocious puberty to genes that regulate the bioavailability of IGF1, insulin-like growth factor – while counseling patients, advising students and fellows, managing grants, reviewing studies and speaking at international pediatric endocrinology conferences.

He’s harnessing this data by combining genomic insights with electronic health records and patient registries. While some of this information can be used immediately to identify a high-risk patient, other conditions may take years to understand. Dr. Dauber views this as an investment in the future of pediatric endocrinology.

“I’m excited to join Children’s National and to work in Washington, where we can power our city and the nation with premier partnerships and collaboration,” adds Dr. Dauber. “In addition to using genetic clues to investigate growth disorders, we’re just as enthusiastic about investing in and expanding access to youth-focused diabetes education and care.”

Susannah Jenkins, PA-C, guides a new training program for physician assistants.

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Susannah Jenkins, PA-C, lead physician assistant with the emergency medicine and trauma services department at Children’s National Health System, celebrates three years at Children’s National this September and she’s glad she transitioned from an adult surgical environment to the fast-paced, dynamic environment of working in pediatric emergency medicine (PEM).

With 25 years of health care experience, 13 years as a physician assistant and 12 years as a nurse, Jenkins has worked in a variety of settings, inclusive of adult neurosurgery and high-risk OBGYN care.

“My passion is helping everyone heal, but I particularly enjoy working with children,” notes Jenkins. “Children have an extraordinary ability to bounce back after a fall and recover from a bout of seasonal, flu-like illness. A dose of medication or the correct diagnosis, paired with the right treatment, can sometimes make everything better, almost instantaneously, which is one of the most rewarding parts of working in this field. You get to help and see children heal.”

In addition to providing treatment for a range of pediatric patients, Jenkins works with Deena Berkowitz, M.D., M.P.H., a pediatric emergency medicine physician and assistant professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Children’s National and the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, to train physician assistants, or PAs, to respond to urgent care needs within a Level 1 trauma center. With the encouragement and guidance of Dr. Berkowitz and Robert J. Freishtat, M.D., M.P.H., chief of emergency medicine at Children’s National, Jenkins expanded on an emergency medicine training program for PAs, which started at Children’s National in 2012.

Jenkins presents the 12-month module at the American Academy of Physician Assistants 2018 Annual Conference in New Orleans on Saturday, May 19, 2018.

“This is all about education,” notes Jenkins. “We’re here to support the PA and we aim to answer questions they have about education goals, competency goals and practice goals in an institutional setting. This template provides the foundation to bridge the gap between post-graduation studies with the skills PAs need and are eager to develop throughout their career.”

Jenkins is currently working with Dr. Berkowitz to develop guidelines for PAs treating medium-acuity patients, inclusive of patients seeking a higher level of primary care, such as for appendicitis, and for PA-training-programs that extend past one year. Jenkins notes the 12-month program she presents at the American Academy of Physician Assistants 2018 Annual Conference is a template that can be applied to any PA subspecialty and is a desirable program for both employers and PA applicants.

“Ultimately, I sought to provide a guide that answered all of my questions I had as a new graduate and as a seasoned PA entering the new subspecialty of pediatric emergency medicine,” says Jenkins. “This program blends the academic science with clinical case studies and practice competencies, making it a modifiable learning platform that’s beneficial for everyone – but specifically designed for PAs. Remember, they enter the field with the desire to support physicians and their patients.”

Her guiding question isn’t on the final test but it helps her with the program design: How can we train PAs to provide the kind of care we want for our children, for our families and for our neighbors?

“I am proud of all of the PAs in this program and of all of the PAs I work with,” Jenkins concludes. “I actively refer them to family members and friends seeking urgent pediatric care. I am confident in the abilities of my group. They represent the type of provider I would send my family and my friends to see, and ultimately your family and friends to see, if they were in need.”

Dr. Berkowitz agrees and is happy with the success the program has had in preparing an average of six to eight PAs each year with the tools they need to launch their career.

Pediatric asthma takes a heavy toll on patients and families alike. Affecting more than 7 million children in the U.S., it’s the most common nonsurgical diagnosis for pediatric hospital admission, with costs of more than $570 million annually. Understanding how to care for these young patients has significantly improved in the last several decades, leading the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to issue evidence-based guidelines on pediatric asthma in 1990. Despite knowing more about this respiratory ailment, overall morbidity – measured by attack rates, pediatric emergency department visits or hospitalizations – has not decreased over the last decade.

“We know how to effectively treat pediatric asthma,” says Kavita Parikh, M.D., M.S.H.S., a pediatric hospitalist at Children’s National Health System. “There’s been a huge investment in terms of quality improvements that’s reflected in how many papers there are about this topic in the literature.”

However, Dr. Parikh notes, most of those quality-improvement papers do not focus on inpatient discharge, a particularly vulnerable time for patients. Up to 40 percent of children who are hospitalized for asthma-related concerns come back through the emergency department within one year. One-quarter of those kids are readmitted.

“It’s clear that we need to do better at keeping kids with asthma out of the hospital. The point at which they’re being discharged might be an effective time to intervene,” Dr. Parikh adds.

To determine which interventions hold promise, Dr. Parikh and colleagues recently performed a systematic review of studies involving quality improvements after inpatient discharge. They published their findings in the May 2018 edition of the journal, Pediatrics. Because May is National Asthma and Allergy Awareness month, she adds, it’s a timely fit.

The researchers combed the literature, looking for research that tested various interventions at the point of discharge for their effect on hospital readmission anywhere from fewer than 30 days after discharge to up to one year later. They specifically searched for papers published from 1991, the year after the NIH issued its original asthma care guidelines, until November 2016.

Their search netted 30 articles that met these criteria. A more thorough review of each of these studies revealed common themes to interventions implemented at discharge:

Nine studies focused on standardization of care, such as introducing or revising a specific clinical pathway

Nine studies focused on education, such as teaching patients and their families better self-management strategies

Five studies focused on tools for discharge planning, such as ensuring kids had medications in-hand at the time of discharge or assigning a case manager to navigate barriers to care and

Seven studies looked at the effect of multimodal interventions that combined any of these themes.

When Dr. Parikh and colleagues examined the effects of each type of intervention on hospital readmission, they came to a stunning conclusion: No single category of intervention seemed to have any effect. Only multimodal interventions that combined multiple categories were effective at reducing the risk of readmission between 30 days and one year after initial discharge.

“It’s indicative of what we have personally seen in quality-improvement efforts here at Children’s National,” Dr. Parikh says. “With a complex condition like asthma, it’s difficult for a single change in how this disease is managed to make a big difference. We need complex and multimodal programs to improve pediatric asthma outcomes, particularly when there’s a transfer of care like when patients are discharged and return home.”

One intervention that showed promise in their qualitative analysis of these studies, Dr. Parikh adds, is ensuring patients are discharged with medications in hand—a strategy that also has been examined at Children’s National. In Children’s focus groups, patients and their families have spoken about how having medications with them when they leave the hospital can boost compliance in taking them and avoid difficulties is getting to an outside pharmacy after discharge. Sometimes, they have said, the chaos of returning home can stymie efforts to stay on track with care, despite their best efforts. Anything that can ease that burden may help improve outcomes, Dr. Parikh says.

“We’re going to need to try many different strategies to reduce readmission rates, engaging different stakeholders in the inpatient and outpatient side,” she adds. “There’s a lot of room for improvement.”

Funding for this work was provided by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) under grant K08HS024554. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of AHRQ.

https://innovationdistrict.childrensnational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/inhaler.jpg300400Innovation Districthttps://innovationdistrict.childrensnational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/idlogo1-tagline-Advances-in-Medicine.gifInnovation District2018-05-15 13:43:292018-05-16 14:48:11Keeping kids with asthma out of the hospital

“As a community-focused health system, one of our central missions is to train a new generation of residents to create successful community partnerships and integrate public health concepts into the everyday practice of medicine to improve the health of underserved communities,” says Cara Lichtenstein, M.D., MPH.

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The Children’s National Community Health Track (CHT) has been recognized by the Academic Pediatric Association with its prestigious Teaching Program Award. The honor was made public at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting on May 7, 2018 in Toronto, Ontario. The purpose of the award is to foster interest in the teaching of general pediatrics by giving national recognition to an outstanding general pediatric program. The PAS selection committee chose Children’s CHT for demonstrating excellence in educational teaching methods, acceptance by the community, its adaptability and the outstanding quality of residents trained in the program.

“As a community-focused health system, one of our central missions is to train a new generation of residents to create successful community partnerships and integrate public health concepts into the everyday practice of medicine to improve the health of underserved communities,” says Cara Lichtenstein, M.D., MPH and director of Children’s Community Health Track.

Children’s CHT focuses on underserved populations and the development of skills in health policy, advocacy and community healthcare delivery. Residents spend their outpatient time learning to use public health techniques to identify and address community health needs, becoming a physician advocate and learning more about the sociocultural determinants of health and health disparities. Training for CHT is integrated with Children’s overall pediatrics residency program to ensure excellence in attainment of clinical skills, and to allow residents the opportunity to work with Children’s top-rated primary care, specialty and hospital-based physicians and care teams.

This is the third time in recent years that Children’s National has been honored by the Academic Pediatric Association. In 2013, Mary Ottolini, M.D., MPH and vice chair of medical education was recognized for her leadership of Children’s Master Teacher Leadership Development program. In 2009, Denice Cora-Bramble, M.D., MBA accepted the APA Health Care Delivery Award for the Goldberg Center for Community Pediatric Health at Children’s National.

Children’s offers up to eight residency positions each year designated as Community Health Track positions. The goals of the track are centered on the core competencies of community pediatrics as described by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Primarily to train residents to:

Grasp the breadth of diversity inherent in the pediatric population and be familiar with health-related implications of cultural beliefs and practices of groups represented in the community.

Recognize the role of the pediatrician in identifying needs and facilitating access to resources for patients, families and communities.

Be aware of the risks to health and barriers to care for underserved children in Washington, D.C., and demonstrate skill in improving access to continuous comprehensive health maintenance.

Appreciate key issues related to the pediatrician’s role and interactions with local community agencies and advocacy groups.

Value the role of schools and childcare settings in supporting the educational and psychosocial development of children and adolescents.

Apply key principles about health promotion and disease prevention for children and adolescents over a set period of time.

Observe, interpret and report observations about the communities in which they serve.

The fundamental difference in this track compared to the more traditional Categorical Track lies in the outpatient experiences that occur in all three years of training. The CHT utilizes these outpatient experiences to help residents to attain a well-rounded community pediatrics experience.

“Washington, D.C. is an incredibly diverse community with large numbers of vulnerable children and families from D.C. and all over the world. Given our location in our nation’s capital, residents and faculty have the unique opportunity to work with national professional and advocacy organizations that are influencing policy – both locally and nationally – as it relates to children, families and health care,” says Mark Weissman, M.D., chief of general pediatrics and community health at Children’s National. “We’re thrilled to be recognized with the Academic Pediatric Association’s Teaching Program Award and grateful to Dr. Lichtenstein for her leadership and commitment to improving the health of D.C.’s children and training the next generation of pediatricians and advocates.”

“Diversity powers innovation” was brought to life at Children’s National April 16 to 20, 2018, during the eighth annual Research and Education Week. Children’s faculty were honored as President’s Award winners and for exhibiting outstanding mentorship, while more than 360 scientific poster presentations were displayed throughout the Main Atrium.

Two clinical researchers received Mentorship Awards for excellence in fostering the development of junior faculty. Lauren Kenworthy, Ph.D received the award for Translational Science and Murray M. Pollack, M.D., M.B.A., was recognized in the Clinical Science category as part of Children’s National Health System’s Research and Education Week 2018.

Dr. Kenworthy has devoted her career to improving the lives of people on the autism spectrum and was cited by former mentees as an inspirational and tireless counselor. Her mentorship led to promising new lines of research investigating methods for engaging culturally diverse families in autism studies, as well as the impact of dual language exposure on cognition in autism.

Meanwhile, Dr. Pollack was honored for his enduring focus on motivating early-career professionals to investigate outcomes in pediatric critical care, emergency medicine and neonatology. Dr. Pollack is one of the founders of the Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network. He developed PRISM 1 and 2, which has revolutionized pediatric intensive care by providing a methodology to predict mortality and outcome using standardly collected clinical data. Mentees credit Dr. Pollack with helping them develop critical thinking skills and encouraging them to address creativity and focus in their research agenda.

In addition to the Mentorship and President’s Awards, 34 other Children’s National faculty, residents, interns and research staff were among the winners of Poster Presentation awards. The event is a celebration of the commitment to improving pediatric health in the form of education, research, scholarship and innovation that occurs every day at Children’s National.

Children’s Research Institute (CRI) served as host for the week’s events to showcase the breadth of research and education programs occurring within the entire health system, along with the rich demographic and cultural origins of the teams that make up Children’s National. The lineup of events included scientific poster presentations, as well as a full slate of guest lectures, educational workshops and panel discussions.

“It’s critical that we provide pathways for young people of all backgrounds to pursue careers in science and medicine,” says Vittorio Gallo, Ph.D., Children’s chief research officer and CRI’s scientific director. “In an accelerated global research and health care environment, internationalization of innovation requires an understanding of cultural diversity and inclusion of different mindsets and broader spectrums of perspectives and expertise from a wide range of networks,” Gallo adds.

“Here at Children’s National we want our current and future clinician-researchers to reflect the patients we serve, which is why our emphasis this year was on harnessing diversity and inclusion as tools to power innovation,” says Mark L. Batshaw, M.D., physician-in-chief and chief academic officer of Children’s National.

“Research and Education Week 2018 presented a perfect opportunity to celebrate the work of our diverse research, education and care teams, who have come together to find innovative solutions by working with local, national and international partners. This event highlights the ingenuity and inspiration that our researchers contribute to our mission of healing children,” Dr. Batshaw concludes.

Awards for the best posters were distributed according to the following categories:

Basic and translational science

Quality and performance improvement

Clinical research

Community-based research and

Education, training and program development.

Each winner illustrated promising advances in the development of new therapies, diagnostics and medical devices.

The day of discharge from a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) can be overwhelming for families and for hospital staff. A Children’s National Health System team found that beginning discharge education early, communicating in ways attuned to families’ needs and using a classroom setting to teach hands-on skills for newborn care can improve parents’ experience during the discharge process, according to a study presented at the 2017 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) national conference.

“So much innovation in our NICU comes from listening to parents,” says Michelande Ridoré, M.S., program lead in Children’s Division of Neonatology. “Beyond caring for the child, we also care for the family, and input from parents helps improve our processes and improve parents’ readiness to care for their child when a NICU baby is ready to go home.”

With discharge, the first hint of a problem in the NICU came from lagging Press Ganey scores, measures of families’ satisfaction with their overall hospital experience. Parents whose very sick infants had round-the-clock care felt overwhelmed by the array of skills they needed to learn to replicate that care at home. NICU staff determined the root cause of the problem and, using the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Model for Improvement, former NICU parents, nurse educators, family support specialists and quality improvement managers crafted strategies to ameliorate them.

Already, Children’s NICU parents can “room in,” sleeping in their child’s room overnight as discharge nears in order to practice caring for a child with complex care needs. Children’s goal was to increase the number of discharge education sessions so that 90 percent of parents would receive discharge guidance more than 24 hours before their newborn was released from the NICU. The sessions included such staples as how to bathe and feed newborns who often were intubated; the benefits of skin-to-skin contact that characterizes kangaroo care; the child’s diagnosis and immunization status; optimal placement while sleeping; a hearing test and a car seat test, among other information.

“When we speak with parents, they said ‘I had no idea my car seat expired. I had no idea I needed to stay for a car seat test. You had an x, y and z list for me to take my child home. Now, I’ve interacted with someone who told me about that check list and how important it is,’ ” Ridoré says.

Many parents received the one-hour sessions in a classroom setting. On the door to their child’s room, they received alerts indicating whether they had completed courses. Beside the bed was a poster to help track progress toward discharge goals.

According to the study authors, the initiative boosted the number of parents who received discharge training in the 24 hours prior to discharge by 27 percent, a figure that grew over time to a 36 percent boost in such timely communication. Satisfaction scores improved and, in interviews, NICU staff said the process improvements streamlined how much time it takes to prepare families for discharge.

“Preparing parents for discharge in a classroom setting was a successful way to increase the number of families who receive this education before their child prepares to leave the NICU,” Ridoré says. “Families and nurses are happy. In the next phase of this research, we will quantify improvements in satisfaction and further refine pre-discharge training sessions.”

The Celiac Disease Program at Children’s National has created a new digital app for celiac disease and gluten-free diet management.

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Celiac disease affects approximately one in 100 children, making it one of the most common conditions in children. To help patients and their families understand more about the disease and live a safe, gluten-free lifestyle, the Celiac Disease Program at Children’s National has created a gluten-free diet app.

The Celiac Disease and Gluten-Free Diet Digital Resource Center app was designed to offer all of the Celiac Disease Program’s educational tools in one place. “We have so many incredibly valuable resources, but all were housed in different places, making it very difficult to show people where to find them,” explains Vanessa Weisbrod, education director of the Celiac Disease program. “We created the app as a way to put everything in one place, but also as a mechanism for sharing our tools with the rest of the world.”

“We are one of the few celiac programs in the country truly dedicated to developing high quality in-house patient education tools for families living with celiac disease,” says Weisbrod. “As we’ve shown our materials to other programs, they always ask us to share them. Through the app, anyone living a gluten-free lifestyle now has access to these remarkable tools.”

Mary Ottolini, M.D., M.P.H., M.Ed., vice chair of medical education at Children’s National Health System and professor of pediatrics at The George Washington University, recently received the Council on Medical Student Education in Pediatrics (COMSEP) Achievement Award during the group’s annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. This prestigious award is given to a current or former COMSEP member who has made major contributions to the organization and its members.

Since joining the organization in 2000, Dr. Ottolini has become a leader in the COMSEP Education Technology task force, a mentor to medical students, a teacher in clinical settings and an education innovator. Currently, Dr. Ottolini’s work with COMSEP is focused on overturning a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services regulation that bars medical students from documenting in the medical record, which interferes with their progress to becoming physicians. She continues to uphold the educational mission of Children’s National in caring for children by training the pediatric experts of tomorrow.

New research shows the effectiveness of an Advance Care Planning model developed through participatory research with adolescents in improving palliative care among adult people living with #HIV
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